Dr. Sharon Vaughn to Receive Special Education Research Award from Council for Exceptional Children April 5, 2012

Dr. Sharon Vaughn, executive director for the College of Education’s Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk, has been honored with the 2012 Council for Exceptional Children’s (CEC) Special Education Research Award.

She will accept the award in April at the CEC’s annual convention and expo in Denver.

According to the CEC, the Special Education Research Awardrecognizes an individual whose “research has significantly advanced the education of children and youth with exceptionalities.”

For the past 30 years, Vaughn’s research has significantly expanded the knowledge base in special education and has been instrumental in developing educational interventions and practices that improve outcomes for students with disabilities. Her research also has contributed to the increased implementation of research-based practices in the nation’s classrooms.

“Her work has been central in helping to identify defining attributes of individuals with learning disabilities, as well as in specifying some high leverage variables and instructional protocols used to improve outcomes for students with disabilities,” says Donald Deshler, director of the Center for Research on Learning at the University of Kansas.

“Sharon’s work is widely quoted and recognized well beyond the field of special education. She is considered to be among the leading scholars in conceptualizing and researching tiered models of instruction and the underlying instructional dynamics that lead to positive student outcomes within such models.”

Vaughn’s early research focused on studies that documented the extent to which educators provided research-based services and instruction to students with disabilities, as well as the social characteristics of those students.

The second phase of her research career addressed effective instructional interventions as well as contributions to response to intervention (RTI) frameworks. Vaughn and her colleagues have conducted some of the most significant initial research on multi-tiered approaches to reading interventions, documentation of students’ responses to intervention, and frameworks for the application of RTI in reading.

Most recently, Vaughn’s work has included syntheses, meta-analyses, organization and reporting of research so that findings can guide future research and practice. She has published research syntheses in numerous areas, including early reading, reading in the upper elementary grades, graphic organizers, and reading interventions at the secondary level.

Vaughn has published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles, 50 chapters and 10 books, contributing significantly to the knowledge, practice, program development and policy needs of students with disabilities.

She’s also published more than 15 research articles in CEC’s premier peer-reviewed journal Exceptional Children,becoming the first author to publish more than 10 articles in the journal. Vaughn has contributed more than seven articles to CEC’s peer-reviewed research-to-practice journal TEACHING Exceptional Children andwritten two textbooks for teacher training.

Additionally, Vaughn has been president of CEC’s Division for Learning Disabilities (DLD), chair of the Research Committee, co-editor of the DLD journal Learning Disabilities Research & Practice and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Learning Disabilities.